 Hey, Gulfconn Giants, your host, Eric Coffey. And today we're bringing you another guest for the Gulfconn Giants podcast, Gene Abany's Pain. This is actually episode 110, right? Not counting the making of Giants episodes. But listen, stay tuned. This episode, Gene Abany's Pain, her company, she has 20 years of experience of doing diversity training in the workplace. And so she brings all that experience into her business that was founded back in 2014. And now she's supporting the Department of Defense, Treasury, NASA, Homeland Security, Department of Energy, and other organizations providing workplace and cultural training and also translation services. That's right, translation services. She is bilingual. She is a disabled veteran of the Navy. And so she's bringing us all this information, even if you are not in that space in that industry. I guarantee there's so much you can learn from this episode because she talks about not only the business side of it, but her personal side and how she built up her stamina and all of her life experiences that got her to the point where she's at today, to where she's now got a fully successful thriving businesses with only a couple more hires, it's gonna be running on its own. So definitely stay tuned for this organization to learn how you can build a similar type of business and grow it in the same way. So stay tuned. I hope you enjoy this episode today with our next upcoming Giants. Well, hi, Eric. My name is Jeanne Ibanez-Pane. I am the CEO of TI-Rovatim Consulting. Welcome, welcome today. Thank you. And where are you based out of? So we have two locations, one in West Virginia and another one in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Fredericksburg, Virginia, okay. West Virginia, I've never been to West Virginia. What is that like? It's a beautiful town. I think it's very much misrepresented, very friendly people. A lot of great opportunities, especially for any A&A company. And West Virginia? Yes, yes. Oh, you gotta tell me that. Yes, yes, so. I would have never guessed that. Oh yeah, I mean, I tell you, I always advocate for the small business office in West Virginia. And they have, as you know, there's not a lot of diversity in West Virginia. So you're not a lot of A&A companies. So contrary to, you know, to being in DC or Richmond, Virginia, right? Where there's a case worker, as we call it for 78 A's, right? Or even 100 in DC. In West Virginia, you're only looking at seven to eight person and they have the best small business office that you couldn't ask for. You know, that's very, I love that because that, before we got started, you said to me, hey, Eric, I want to come on and talk to A&A's and small business about strategies, right? And ways to win. You came out the gate with enough strategy immediately because I've seen that in a smaller states like Rhode Island where there was only eight A&A companies in the whole state. And then if you narrow down the construction, there was three. So yeah, I love that already. That's great. And you know what, Eric? What is fascinating is, I see, I call it fascinating is that most times it takes 24 to 72 hours for a contracting officer to hear from any SBA office. I mean, I can attest to my SBA office. Sometimes they respond within 30 minutes, within one hour, Saturday, Sunday. I mean, and they're so committed to the A&A company and the contracting officers love love the SBA office because they're like, we have never seen anything like this before. I was about to say that. Contrary to the horror stories that I hear from other SBA offices, this is a total 180. Yes. That's amazing. I think you got really lucky. You have to be very strategic before you get that A&A certification. I love that. I love that. So tell us, I know that your slogan is wanting to help people work better together. Tell us about your business and what kind of, what industries are you in? So Tiberbedum Consulting, we are in the business of, we like to help people work better together. And what we do, we do culture assessments. And literally, Eric, that is coming in into the workplace and analyzing the people, the processes, the policies, the core values and making recommendations to improve the culture. We also do workforce training and language translation and interpretation. And we do that across 10 plus, different states in the U.S. Now, what I think that I really, and doing my research to interview today, and I said to myself, wow, you didn't pick the typical IT, cyber, staffing. You didn't pick those typical, what people seem as like, this is what the government buys, right? The most of, and I'm gonna go after this area. How did you pick those three areas, the three disciplines to work in? How did you choose those? So, I wanna go back to 2014 when I first started the company. And I did human resources, diversity, equity and inclusions. And when I committed to the government environment, I had no experience doing any government work. But I knew that I was really committed to my passion, which is to help people work better together. Either that is through improving the morale in the workplace, to workforce training, to leadership development. And for me, it was important to stick to what I was great at. Because often what you see is people wanna follow the money trail, right? And if you don't stick to what you are successful and what you love to do, you're not gonna be great. I always tell people, it's like, you know what? If you tell me to do IT, cybersecurity, and any of those things, I think I'm not gonna be engaged. And we love doing what we do and we have such a great successful team. And Eric, I mean, we have been in business since really 2015. We have close to 70 employees. We've got 32 plus contracts. We'll be around nine to a million dollars by the end of this year. But it's really because the passion that we have for what we do and we don't settle for just, okay, we're gonna make money. I wanna make sure that we're doing something that makes a difference. No, that's incredible. Again, going back to what we said before the show, there's so many A&A companies that are not hitting those marks. They're underutilizing the programs. They're not maximizing opportunities. Let's talk about that. How is it that you're able to grow that quickly, that fast? All right, so we gave the first check box, West Virginia office, that was great. So that's great. All right, so you're in a place where the SBA is supporting you and helping you and very responsive. And that is of tremendous value, especially when you're in these programs. You need, I don't think a small business understand, but if you're gonna be in an A&A program, you have to be side-by-side with your SBA rep, your BOS. They're extremely valuable. So tell me what else, what other things are you doing? So I will tell you that the SBA is gonna be an advocate for you. Right. You're going to support you, but you're not gonna do your work. So there's the preconceived idea of many small businesses that they think that, okay, if I got my A&A certification is my SBA reps responsibility to be looking out for contracts for me. And that is not going to happen. I mean, I think that has been the big reality check for some companies where it has been four years and they're still having gotten the first contract. Right. We actually got our first contract in two months, okay? Because we were prepared and we were actually admitted into the SBA A&A program six months early, okay? So you have to wait two years, but if you're ready, they let you in six months early, okay? So this is what I, this is what we did and this is what I tell people you got to be procurement ready, okay? You got to be procurement ready for the A&A program. If you're not, it doesn't matter if you have the A&A certifications. So what does it look like? When we first started the business we actually want our first contract to an open competition, okay? None set aside or anything. We went for it and we were strategic in how we responded and we won the contract. Okay. But at the point to write for the first year and a half or two years, I was always, I call it being a lobbyist to the government and to the agencies that I wanted to do business with. Hey, so for example, we do a lot of work with the Department of Energy. I was always talking to the contracting officers. Hey, this is what we do. This is what we know how to do well. And by the way, we are getting, we're submitting our A&A applications and we should have it on this date. And then when we got it, I was constantly following up with them to establish and cultivate a relationship, okay? So what is so important is that there's all this pre-work that people have to do before they get their A&A, right? Once you get your A&A certification, again, like I said, it doesn't guarantee you're gonna be getting contracts left and right. You have to know your customer. You have to understand what is it that they're buying, but also you have to be doing your research. There has been several contracts when I go through the forecasts and I look for who are those companies who are graduating for the program, okay? Can I develop a relationship with them? And then I start contacting them, but also how you respond to sources thought, how you do white papers. I don't know if there's a lot of people over there that do white papers, but they are very successful. So you just have to go into the forecast and look, okay, so I can do that. Don't do an unsolicited proposal because that opens up a can of warrants for the contracting officer, right? So what we do, we do a lot of white papers, okay? But you also have to customize it. Hey, dear Eric, I know you're the contracting officer for this, I noticed you have a requirement coming up. Here's a white paper on how we can address your issues. Can you pass it on to the program office? So that has been our tremendous success for the A&A program. And then once you start doing a good job, guess what? Contracting officers talk to each other. We have had people from the energy department telling me, hey, somebody from HHS told me that you do great translation, the same thing for cultural assessment. So that is, I would say, I would even call it secret sauce. You just have to be very strategic when you get your A&A certification and be ready to run because it's only nine years. Yeah, you say procurement ready. I love that term procurement ready. Is that, did you learn that from somewhere? Is that just something that you came up with? Oh, no, no. So there's a program called the VIP in Maryland. It's for veterans. The Veterans Institute for Procurement. And one of the big things that they really kind of like ingrain on your head is you got to be procurement ready because if you are, if you win an award, okay? And you don't have, you know, you're, you don't have the funding. Bonding, insurance, right? Right, you don't have insurance. Right, you don't have a credit line, you don't have vendors, right? And your employees are complaining to the government that you're not paying them on time? Right. That's not being procurement ready. It's having that infrastructure to be ready. Right. And don't have the Gmail account once you become a contracting person, right? That is just the most horrible thing because it's like gimpain.gmail.com. People are going to see that, you know what? You're still operating at that very... Right. Ball level. Yeah, yeah. No, I agree with you. I tell them not to trust a part. I mean, you have to look the part. You got to trust the part. Wow, no, that's great. Actually, tell me more about the white papers. Now, okay, you're going into the forecast list and you're writing white papers. I didn't even, I've never heard that strategy before. Right, so... I've heard it, okay, let me take that back. I've heard it for like IT. I've never heard it for anything outside of the IT sector because they're usually asking us to submit white papers to solve problems, but you're submitting them unsolicited. Mm-hmm. So tell me about that. Yes. So basically the white papers are very simple. Keep it to two or three pages, including your title page. Okay. And I... What we typically do is that we customize it to a specific opportunity. So let's say, Eric, that you have been, you're a company and you know that consistently that opportunity has been awarded as a direct award every four or five years, right? And then you know that company is going to be graduating, which not necessarily mean that the government wants them to come back and be subs, right? That's true, right. So it doesn't always mean that the government likes incumbent. Right, great. Okay, great. So what we do is you do your research to determine, okay, what are they looking for? Is there a public PWS? Can you go to government? Can you go to the federal procurement system to see what the award was for? And then you start putting the pieces together, right? And so once you understand what the PWS looks like and you look at your core competencies and I will tell you, do not tell them that you can do something that you can't do. They will figure it out, okay? When it's time to perform. I should have like 50 things on my list. Exactly. It's like, that's why I tell people, we're great at doing three things. Not 10, not 15, three things, okay? So basically you do your homework, you look at the PWS, you do your research and then you start draft their white paper and then you align your core competencies to their need. And then you let them know exactly how they can reach you and then you package it and you send it to them and then you follow up. Don't just send it and not follow up, follow up. Would that be similar to how you respond to a source of thought or RFI? Very similar. Yes. Yes. No, because again, we have those documents that we respond to using source of thoughts. I can see it's very similar in nature, except you're not responding to some of the, they put out, you're looking at some needs and you're addressing it. So you know what? I'm so glad that you just brought up the source of thought. And this is more of also another nugget is when we respond to sources of thought we're very deliberate with their response. Many people think that, oh yeah, you know what? If I'm responding to the sources of thought and I just give them a can explanation or I just a can three or four page document that they're gonna be okay with that now. You got to be deliberate, right? You know that you have to be deliberate, you have to do your homework, you have to find the pain points and then you got to customize it so you can shape that requirement. Yeah, a lot of people don't understand about shaping requirements and they sound like something illegal, but they don't, if you understand what stage the government's at and the cycle, then you'll know what that means. Wow, that's wonderful. And again, I go back and I think to myself, right? You're in an industry or space that I would be like, the government buys language services? Yes, yes, yep. What do they do with that? Are you, I mean, tell me more like what are they, what are they translating? Oh, so we have had a couple of contracts with DHS to do work for TSA, which I'm sure you're familiar with TSA. Right, we all are. If DIC, some of those, if you have a bank account you know what the FDIC is, so some of the documents. Also HHS, right? If you go to the HHS night at NIDA, all the Spanish information and literature and how to fight drug addiction. We have done a lot of that. We have done a lot of also the DDA. Okay, okay, okay. And right now you said you provide over a hundred different languages? Yes. Now, when you started, how many did you provide? When you first had started? Two. The ones you knew. The ones you knew. So when I first started the company, I spent 15 years in the utility industry and I was commuting 75 miles each way. And I had no experience with government contracting, Eric, whatsoever. And I came home one day and I told my husband, I said, you know what? I don't wanna do this commute anymore, I'm done. And I'm gonna start a company, I'm gonna be a government contractor. And my husband looked at me like, okay, you don't know anything about anything. Do you know what Sam is? Do you know what Dunn's? I'm like, no, but it's gonna work out. So we started with language translation interpretation and that's how the TI verbatim came about, right? Verbatim word by word. And then after that kind of morphed into other things. So really the pipelines of language translation is we have a pipeline of certified translators. And so anytime that there's a need from the customer, we just reach to our translators for availability and that we coordinate their needs. I like that, I like that, I like that. And again, so now you didn't know anything about government contracting, why did you pick government contracting? And why did you choose government contracting specifically? Oh my gosh, I don't, you know what? I don't know. It just to me, it sounded sexy. I was like, oh, you know what? Like government contracting. Everybody talks about government contracting. I'm like, Mars, well, just try it. And I go back to my husband telling me, he's like two or three months later after I quit my job, he says, so what's your plan B? If some of this, if it doesn't work out and I'm like, there's no plan B, it's gonna work out, right? That was in 2014. And again, fast forward to 2021 and we've just been so successful but I think it goes back to, you gotta be intentional, you gotta be deliberate, right? You gotta have a plan, you have to have a strategy, you have to execute. And so that's what I have done the entire time. What gave you that confidence to know that it would work out for you? I have always had confidence. Okay. You know, my father, so I'm from Columbia, South America and I was born here in the US and my father came to the US and he worked blue collar jobs. He earned money to go back to Columbia and buy his business. And then I came back when I was 15 years old and my father always told me, and I know that you have this, that you're a Spanish audience as well. He told me that in Spanish is, tomar dos pasos para adelante, pero ni uno para atrás para coger impulso. So basically while he was telling me, he says, I want you always to take two steps forward but never even one back for impulse. Okay. And so he has always had the mentality of entrepreneurial mentality and he always pushed me inside my comfort zone that, you know what? You need to be working for yourself. You should not be working for anybody else. So he really gave me the confidence that I needed to push me inside a comfort zone to go and do it. Was it easy? It wasn't easy at all. It was the first two years, Eric, were the two toughest years of my life, aside from joining the military and not knowing how to speak English. But I tell you what, you know, if you commit yourself to doing it, you're gonna get it done. No regrets. What would you tell a small business that is listening to this and what's interesting is, and I love women entrepreneurs. So I'm a huge fan already. I just had another woman entrepreneur on a few hours ago and she did the same thing. She quit her job and started Cold Turkey. Which, I mean, what would you tell someone sitting on that and like, they're like, I can't do that. I can't quit my job and just start Cold Turkey. How did you do it? Like how did you, how were you able to support yourself in doing that? How did you replace that income, I should say? Forget support, how do you replace the income or did you not replace the income or did you save money to start, get me? Like how do you tell that the, you know, the younger version of yourself, hey, you could do that. So the first thing is, is anything that you set yourself up to do, you will get it done, no questions. You just have to have the commitment, you have to have the passion and you have to have the drive to never give up, right? You have to have a support group. For me, it was my family, right? My brother, my dad, my husband, who will kick me out to the street to go and sell. You're gonna do it, you're great. Get it done, just go. So that's the biggest, the first thing that I had to have was that support system from my family, right? Once I got that check in regards to resources and money, we have been saving money, you know, the 401k savings. And basically, so the funny thing is that after my husband asked, what's your plan B? Two years later, he quit his job to come and work for the company. So now you have gone from two people making six figures, right? To nothing, only just his military pension, which was not a lot. We basically, we sold our dream home. You sold your dream home. We cashed out our 401ks, okay? We made some drastic, drastic changes that we needed to make. And I press on, never look back. That's, that is remarkable. That's commitment. Yes. That is, you know what that says to me? That's burning the bridges behind you. Yes. You went, you set the bridge on fire, you said, you know what, this is gonna work. Yes. And what are you, obviously 70 employees, $10 million sales, you proved that it was worth it. Yep. Wow, wow, wow. So if everyone's listening out there and you're asking yourself, you know, what do you think? I mean, this is, she's telling you, that's wonderful. I'm, I feel like we need a moment of silence. You know, I, I'm always, you know, but also, you know, one of the things to have learned is being humble and being compassionate, right? Give back, reach back. As you are developing and you're learning, there's always opportunities to help other people, right? Who are upcoming. And I always tell people, do not take for granted that person that is just coming up because you don't know where they're gonna be in three or four or five years, okay? So they'll never close the door on people that have potential, that have energy that want to grow, help them, right? Because you never know where you're gonna be. The world turns, you don't know where you're gonna be five or six years from now. And so I always, let me tell you, can I show you something? Yeah, certainly. This is something that I have here. I don't know if you can read it. Hold on, I'll make you big. Give me humble. It says, I still remember the days I prayed for the days I have now. Oh, I love that. Okay. And I, this keeps me grounded here because I think that's so important that we never forget where we came from, right? And then also why you started a company. For us, it was to creating environment where people fell value and respected. That's the huge thing, it's non-negotiable. For us as a company, I came up with 14 fundamental behaviors that we have to have as a company. And I would encourage any small business up there that, I know we have poor values and we have mission you got to have some fundamental behaviors that you hold people accountable to. And we have done that in our company. Like number one is, as a CEO, I always have your back. Okay? Practice, blameless problem solving. No one to move on. And so those are the things that I tell people that when you're starting the company, you're building a team. It's so important to be on the same page but also to have compassion and be humble because it's a people business, right? Right, right. No, I'm totally, totally big time. Wow, man, let me tell you. I have not asked you any questions on my list. You're just rolling, you're just rolling it. I love it, I love it, I love it. Maybe we need a part two. I think we're gonna need a part two. I haven't even, I've not read one question off my list. I'm still in like the first paragraph of your information. So you start off with language services. Tell me about, again, I think, because I'm really truly fascinated by what you're doing. Workplace culture assessment. Explain to me, like give us an example of what that looks like for a government agency. Okay, so for us, we have done seven, eight cultural assessments in our company and we actually created a proprietary model that we have internally, right? Nobody has a model like we do. We do what is called a qualitative and quantitative analysis. So we have government agencies that will call us or there might be a procurement and they want us to, let's say that they're having a lot of attrition, right? Or they're having a lot of EEO complaints. They're having a lot of discrimination issues. FEBS course, if you're familiar with those, sometimes those sort of engagement surveys that they do, they might be really high, meaning that, oh, things are going great, but then people are filing EEO reports and people are leaving and minorities are not getting promoted. So we will work with them on coming in and analyzing what we call the people, the processes and the procedures, the core values. And we do focus groups, one-on-one interviews. We work closely with them. When we do the focus groups, we assess their strategy plans, all their information internally to really try to understand from an unbiased perspective what is causing all that chaos in the workplace, right? And after we do that, which it lasts like six months, we do a profile report, okay? And I don't know if you're familiar with 360 assessments, which is the assessments that people will do on individuals. So they do it here, is that the one-week first hire people? Yes, so they do 360 assessments and they'll say, okay, what's great about Eric, what does Eric need to work on? For us, we do it for the entire organization, right? While working with leaderships. And so we give them an opportunity to really kind of understand what's working with the organization, what's not working, what's missing. And then also we do a multi-year strategic plan in how to address every single aspect of that. And so like I said, we have now conducted many of them and our unique approach is really the qualitative and quantitative analysis that really, there's really nobody out there that does it like us right now. Nice. Is your GSA schedule for language translation services? Yes, and also for professional services. We have some administrative support marketing and we're always trying to augment that. That's part of the evolution of the business, right? Right. It's to augment the GSA schedule. We have a facilities clearance. We just obtained our ISO 9000-2000 certification. I saw that, I saw that. Which is awesome. I think about the facility clearance, that's good. I'm gonna make sure that. Yes, yes. And I'll tell you, that's a little bit great investment, maturity investment, the ISO certification because it really speaks to the quality control process for your organization. Nice. I see you're on Navy Seaport. Yes. Is that for the administrative support? No, for technical support services. Technical support, gotcha. Okay. All right. All right. What else do you see yourself headed? Again, you're just starting, man. You're just cranking up. Like where do you see yourself? Where do you see CIBC five years out? You know, we're just having fun. I love that. We are just having fun. I started the company for work-life balance and to be content. And I'm not afraid to say it. Many people will ask me, oh my gosh, you're so aggressive. You have so much energy. Don't you want to be a $20 million company, 200%? I just want to have fun, you know? I mean, this is what we have done up until now. Creating an environment where we're taking the customers, you know, we're delivering nothing but excellence, but we are also taking care of our employees. So they want to come to work every day. That's what we want to keep doing. We want to keep, you know, being very strategic and deliberate and intentional on what we do. And yeah, I just have fun. I will say you do have a ton of energy. You came on with, you came on bringing the energy before we even hit record. So you came on with your energy, like shying through that camera before we even hit record. There has to be something that like a bad time. You tell it all to good times. It's got to be a bad time that you want to share with people. Because while we do appreciate all the energy and all the good times, people was like, come on, there has to be something that was hard. Like, I mean, HR or like, you know, I mean, obviously not something that's personal that you can share it, but what's some aspect of the business that you do find difficult to do that maybe you hire someone else out to do it? You know, I will tell you that when you work hard and you don't win, it can be hard. One of my pet piece in the team knows this is, I don't tolerate disrespect in the workplace. And that is one thing if they want to see me upset, I think we'll go back to those fundamental behaviors that I was telling you that people blame older people for their mistakes instead of saying, hey, what's the mission? That's one of my big, big pet piece. The other one is we are okay with making mistakes. We call that investments. So they know fundamental behavior number one, I will always have your back as the CEO, right? But if there's no sometimes no deliberate strategy and things cause hiccups or let's see colleagues to maybe work extra hours because somebody didn't do their work, sometimes that can be like one of my pet piece, right? But, you know, we work very well together and we have our moments in our team where we are very candid to each other. So yeah, there's times where we do get frustrated. When you first started out and you're starting this business, have you ever ran a business before? No. How did you know how to even price your services? How'd you know what they were worth? How'd you know the value of your services? That's funny you asked that. So it's all about strategy, right? Yes, absolutely. I remember our first contract with the Department of Energy to do a cultural assessment. And I was told by somebody that, don't go after that contract. It's already, what do you call it, cooked or already set up for somebody. I would not even look at it. It was an open competition, okay? Right. And I said, no, I said we're gonna go for it. We know how to do this work and we're gonna price it in a way that we might have to take some risks. And we did. We probably underpriced that contract like by more than 50%, okay? So we want the contract on the fact that the value piece, right? We could deliver, but also I don't think that there was anybody out of any of them who, you know, who priced our stuff as low as we did. So that was the first one that's like, how do you price it, right? Sometimes you got to take some risk, right? For pricing. The same thing with, you know, some of the cultural assessments that we have done if there's an industry that we want to get into. Hey, we would have to take some, we might have to eat some 50 or 100 hours of the cultural assessment and price it in a way that it looks very attractive to them because then they're gonna give us more work. So pricing is all a strategy. When you first starting out, you really have to think about it. What is it? Where do we want to go? Where do I want to be? And how does that shape your pricing? But also you don't want to come across like you're so low that people kind of lose respect for you, right? There's no way you can deliver on that. So everything that we have done has always been kind of like a strategy. We have a pricing strategy that says, okay, well, how do we need to price this? Do we need to price it in a manner that we're comfortable with the best value? Or two, do we need to price it in a way that is low enough that we can still do the work but we're not gonna make any money, okay? Another thing too that I will challenge also people to think about too is when we were first starting out and hey, TIBC, the C is for consultants, okay? Consultants are great. But you also know that if you're gonna do that work for a very, very long time, you should really think about building a bench, right? And so that's what we have done with the cultural assessment is that it's with the cultural assessment, especially with some of the proprietary information and it's like, okay, I have built a team internally of like three, four people to do the cultural assessment so we don't outsource really any of it. For the coaching, we have built, we're starting to build a team where we are delivering a lot of the coaching from our own internal team and using some consultants. So that's another pricing strategy too is think about building your bench if you really want to do that for the long run. No, and I like that because you're using a mix, you're using like a hybrid model, right? Again, you start off with some consultants and then you kind of learn and then you start building your bench but you're still using part consultants and I'm sure that percentage, right? It's like maybe 100% consultants then it went 90% and then 70%, right? So eventually maybe it's 50, 50 or maybe even 40% consultants, 60% your bench. I like that, I like that. What other things for the small person that's starting out? What other warnings would you give them, I would say because people, I'm going to take this risk, I'm going to do these things, what should I be afraid of? What should I be cautious? What kind of things do I need to do? We understand need to be procurement ready. What other things am I missing that I don't know? I think one of the things I have learned the hard way is stop chasing stuff. Talk to me. Stop chasing shiny stuff. Okay, what I mean by that is, so let's go back to what you were asking me about, hey, you can't be on like energy 10 all the time. There's another thing that I can get you in big trouble is you don't do your homework. Okay, you see a shiny, beautiful, administrative support services, right? For 10 people and then you go out and find a subcontractor and then you start putting everything together. And then at the 11th hour, you read the PWS and you realize a Monday morning after you spend the entire weekend doing this, that you know what, we're not ready for this. We are not ready to go after this because we didn't do the due diligence. Okay, they're saying incumbent. And if it's released as a women-owned small business, there's that women-owned small business next to the customer who wants to do that. And that women-owned small business has a lot of work with that. And they're asking for a very customized recipe. And let me tell you, you know the reason why I know how to tell the story really well. And I know my children love me for this is because it just happened to us like very recently. And so we dove into the, to wanting to do this thing. And then there were little things that we missed, you know, that we didn't catch. And by the time we caught it, we had invested so much time. So one thing that I always tell people is, and I'm learning that as we go, I mean, we're learning it, is build a pipeline. Do you capture? Yeah, there's going to be some here and there. But if you're going to respond to something, you got to have a solution. You got to know the customer. Do you have the past performance? So don't just put a proposal together. You should put a proposal together because the government is going to know if you have a lot of fluff in there, you got to solve a problem that they have. Do you know their environment, right? So that I think for me, the biggest one would be, you know, build a plan, build a strategy. You know, one of the beautiful things that having an ISO process is that now we have a capture process. We have a sourcing. We have staffing. We have security. Everything that we do in the company has a process that we have to follow. So that really eliminates the chasing that shiny stuff. I like that. That's great. That's great. You work for a company. You decide to leave the company. You start your company. You don't know pricing. You never had a business. But yet you knew, you had the confidence that it would work out. But you had to support your family. Yes, yes. Yes. And we had a small child too. So, you know, the day I decided to take the sleep of faith was I was commuting 78, 75 miles each way. And I couldn't tell the work. And I remember thinking, you know, there has to be something better, something better that I can do. And I had my professional evaluation done. Let's see, early 2014. It was like a 4.6, almost 5.0. Then I got this new leadership and this was October 2014. And I got my evaluation, it was 3.5 or 3.3. It had gone down that much. And I was told that I communicated too much. I was too direct. And I had too much urgency to get things done. So that moment I said, you know what? I don't think I can make it in the corporate environment. You know, quote unquote, I'm just too mouthy. I'm too confident, you know? And I don't say that in a way that I just, you know, to be egotistic, but you know, I just, I just, you know, from coming to, when my father sent me to the US, I was 15 years old. I went to three different high schools. I was sending a Greyhound bus from California to Georgia when I was 15 years old. I joined the military. I didn't learn, I did not know how to speak English, okay? I was held in boot camp for a couple of weeks. I put myself through the Navy. I paid for my college, my master and all that stuff. You know, I said, you know what? I think I have a little bit of confidence. I can do this. And so that's kind of how that decision happened. It's just, you know, just having confidence and just getting it done. How did you first, okay, now you did that. How did you learn, how did you learn, eight ages? Say, how did you start learning all this stuff? Doing your homework, developing relationship with a small business office. How did you even know the small business office? You know, use federal contract in 101, right? And that's another thing, that's another great point too, Eric, is be intentional with your own education to start a business. Don't expect people to do it for you and to spoon feed you everything, okay? You know, don't be going to people and say, oh, hey, how do you do Sam? How do you do duns? How do you do STV USB? There's so much information over there, right? You start time to really ask great, great questions. So I did a lot of my homework. I develop a lot of relationship with local contractor, federal contractors here in the Fredericksburg area. And I would ask him a lot of questions. Hey, how did you do this? How did you do that? How did you do that? And of course, when I would tell them that I didn't have any government experience and that I was leaving my corporate job, I would get a lot of teeth sucking. Have you heard of that? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, oh, yeah, yeah. You're going to leave your six-year job to do. Your wife is going to do what? Oh, man, she's crazy. So anyway, once I got past that is, you know, they knew that I was really serious and that there was no going back. I just did a lot of homework, right? And then when I felt that I really knew my stuff, that's when I started contacting the small business offices, right? And then you go to the small business events. Then you meet contracting officer and follow up with them. Here's one thing that I used to do that many people don't do. Handwritten note. Some of those contracting officers that I will meet on those events and they will sit down with me to tell me, I will come back. Dear Joe, thank you so much for doing this. Thank you so much for doing that. People that invest time with you, take a moment to remember the special things for them, right? And say, hey, I hope your son is doing okay. I hope they won their soccer game. I hope to see you soon. Hey, by the way, do you have some time for a ten minute phone call? I mean, how can they say no to you when you're already kind of sending them a thank you note and really genuinely try to get to know them, you know? I can tell you, I really, I love handwritten notes. I had a podcast guest of mine send me a handwritten card. And I thought that was fit. I mean, I just thought that was the best thing in the world. So we gotta take it. I have cards over here too, you know? Yeah, I have them. This is what I do. Yeah, you know, it's, you know, it's, I think we get away from our basics of what it takes to build a rapport with people and relationships. We're getting away from that because I hear so many who want to just send blind emails without knowing the person, without having ever spoke to the person. Why they didn't respond back to me? Different font, you know, Joe blue and then the body black and aerial and time. Oh my gosh. Belief. Yeah, I know that's good. That's true. That's a good tip. I like that one. I like that tip. That's a good one. That's a good one. No, I just, again, I'm truly fascinated. In fact, you know, just listen to your story. You make me want to put on a women's conference. Just listening to your story. I'm like, wow, this is a great story. We need to have a women's conference. Yes. So that we can, you know, get you and all of my other podcast guests in front of audience to share things that have, because I just think it's so valuable. And I love, no one can tell your story like you can, but also what I found in my personal experiences, women and my courses do better than the men. Okay. And I also realized that women have had, there's been other, like you said, someone evaluated you, said you're too malady. There's other things that happen that I just can't relate to, right? And I don't have that experience. And someone like yourself could say that in front of a group of women and they all can relate. It's relatable. Does that make sense? Yes. And Eric, can I just add one more thing? Absolutely. To the small businesses, because you know this happens a lot where businesses are starting up and then the husband and wife get involved, right? In the business. And we just fine. But I always tell people because in our company, I'm the CEO of the company. And my husband also works behind the scenes, right? Yes, he kind of supports without the infrastructure, but there's always been a delineation that there has to be a chief who makes the decisions and that the team that supports that. And so I have heard time and time and time again, even from the customers. Oh, so-and-so I just had a fight. Okay, so you know, so-and-so or Mary or something happened, they didn't work out and everybody knows everybody's business and everybody knows now that, yeah, they're a small company and now they got two people fighting all the other stuff. I always tell people it's like, you have 30 seconds to make a good impression and you have to determine, you have to decide what do you want that to be, right? And so if you're gonna embark in a relationship, in a business relationship with many family members or spouses that there are clear boundaries and people understand the expectations. So the dairy laundry doesn't bleed and it's not seen by people. And I know it sounds kind of basic, but I know that with small businesses, we do that a lot. No, it's great. I know of it. I love the basics. Again, we need to be reminded. We need to remind the folks listening to this. We need to remind them of strategies. Even again, even the basics that work, they're old principles that are foundational to regardless of if you're doing business with the government or commercial or private sector, it doesn't matter. Why did you, do you do state contracts? State and local? So we have done a little bit of state. So our goal now is to diversify more for the company. And we're doing quite a bit of work and starting to do a lot of commercial work for EI trainings, cultural assessments, the energy utilities for translation. So we're starting to diversify quite a bit more. No, I just wonder because a lot of times what I hear from my audience is that they think that starting at the state and local area is easier for them. And that's just an assumption, not that it is true. So I'm just wondering why did you not take that route? Why did you choose federal to start as opposed to the local or state? You know, I started actually with the local immigration lawyers. What is that? They had to do translation. Okay, all right. So my focus really was, okay, how can I get it quickest past performance so it can help my professional self-esteem? Okay, because for me to wait two years to win a contract, it was just too much for somebody who's just so driven, right? So I needed to have small wins. So for me, it was like, okay, how do I get a small win of, you know, one birth certificate translation, which was 50 bucks, right? Or 75 bucks or a hundred bucks. And so what that did is I will do all those little things to keep me motivated. So I will not give up. And so that helped me to work up to that first contract that we got, which really, you know, it was not until 2016 that we won that first contract. Before that, those first two years, it was really little things that kept us going. Okay, all right. I'll make a note, by the way, I like that. We're gonna change the subject a little bit. Tell me something that you've purchased from Amazon recently. So I love reading about culture. So I have, let's see, I have the stages, the four stages of psychological safety, I would say was one of the latest ones that I bought. And then because I work a lot with the government is in doing cultural assessment, building a winning culture in government was the other one. I never heard of those books. Yeah. What's that first one about four stages? Four stages of psychological safety is, how do you get psychological safety in your team environment? I don't know what psychological safety means. I don't know what that means. So psychological safety is basically where people come to work and they can be themselves and they can really challenge you in a very respectful way and you don't get offended. Okay, so let's say that we're having a discussion and I feel that, you know, Eric, where you want to go might not be the best way to do it. There might be a better way, but I may be the PM and you are the CEO. Well, how do you have that conversation with that person and feel safe enough to feel that I'm going to be prosecuted and basically told you're too disrespectful? So psychological safety is creating an environment where people feel safe to speak up and hopefully make better decisions. All right, okay. All right, what other books would you recommend or that you've gifted before to small businesses that's wanted to get into government contracting? Maybe that's unrelated to psychological safety or culture to workplace. Are there any other books that you've read on that's related to government contracting or even building a business? Forget government contractors, business, maybe it's a woman entrepreneur, maybe it's a fiction story. See, I have a Lean Six Sigma background. So I would definitely encourage how to develop a strategy books, how to write a business plan, how to establish goals. You know, I do a lot of reading on culture, but I think everything else, I have kind of built a network of CEOs that I go to. A network of CEOs that I can be me and that I can make, I can get help with some tough decisions. And so that's what I would definitely recommend. The hands-on approach, establishing a CEO network, one or two or three people. Like for example, for me, I have, there are three companies. One is a female and two gentlemen's and that's what I typically go for. Hey, you know what? I'm thinking about doing this. What do you think of that? A lot of benchmark, best practices, benchmarking. Yep. Where did you learn that? My MBA class. It's a great tactic. It's like having a board of advisors. Yes. Unofficially. And just doing, I'm always reading. I will have four or five or six books that I'm reading at the same time. Like I go back and forth, right? I go back and forth and because even though the cultural books might not be per cent business books, there's so much that you can get out of those books that you can apply to the business world. So I will tell you one thing that I just read last night that I'm able to apply to the company. So when you're doing a project and you've been a project for 80 hours and you have a customer who wants more and more and more and more, right? And then you start, well, you know what? Sunset wants a special favor and it's going to be five more hours. It's just five more hours. So we're okay with that. Well, then something else happened and we're adding more and more. And the next thing you know, you're at 100 hours. You're only getting paid for 80. You start bleeding money. Okay? So that's a conversation actually that I had with my employees this morning is that you got to be focused on how many hours you've been on the contract while labor categories, you still want to deliver excellence but you want to set expectations. So that will be something that is learned from some of those cultural books. That sounds like I need a culture book. Sorry. Yes. I need a culture book because that happens to me even with the stuff that I do is that people want more and more of my time. I think that happens to all of us, right? And they're like, hey, you know, I bought one of your programs so okay, I get a, you get a one hour call, okay, great. Hey, can you ask this question? Can you answer this question? Can you, hey, I got this other situation. Hey, like, hey, you know, so just it goes into. And guess what? They're going to tell their friends, oh, you know what, Eric? He's available 24 seven and we can do and then next to you now you have set expectations for them to receive the same level of service. Right. Yeah, that's true. That makes sense. That makes sense. I like that. Any sayings that you have quotes, things that you say constantly whether you told me about the ones your father said or anything else that you say like your staff or family or. Yes. Yes. So every time that I go into a meeting, okay, there has to be a purpose. That'd be a what? A purpose. Okay. So we don't count, we don't count to meetings just to have meetings. There has to be an agenda and it has to be a setting the stage. So they laugh when I said, I come to a meeting and said, okay, so we're here today, we're here from 10 to 11. And let's just go ahead and set the stage of why we're here. Because we're going to make sure everybody understands why we're here and what are we looking to accomplish? At the end of the meeting, we accomplished. So the joke in our team is setting the stage. Okay. Now that they're starting to do the same thing. Okay. So let's just go ahead and set the stage for the meeting to make sure everybody understands why we're here and what do we want to accomplish? I like that. Yep. I like it. I like it. So to read all those books, you're not getting time for Netflix? Oh, I love to watch Spanish stuff. Oh, yes. Yes. So let me tell you. How do you balance? I'm looking for how you balance. So one thing that is very important to me is self-care. Okay. Self-care and that is something that we don't do often. And my team knows that I'm not really available before eight 30 or nine o'clock. Okay. Why? Because my son leaves for school at six 50 at seven o'clock. I'm downstairs in the gym, doing my body pump class, kickboxing, whatever. And then they know that after five o'clock in the afternoon, that's where I do all my strategy. When I'm running the dogs, I have two dogs, Dallas and Texas. And we go for a run. And so the mental care, and I always tell people, it's like you've got to take care of yourself, right? And people don't, they don't want to listen with the fact that all of us need mental care, okay? For the ladies, okay? I'm big on, I gotta go get my nails done. My nails getting done is like any other proposal getting done, okay? I like it. Again, it goes back to the Zoom meetings, right? You got 30 seconds to make a good impression. You know, you got to show up. You know, the same thing, you know, take care to go up and get your hair done to make yourself look feel good. The same time with the guys, go golf and do go to the gym and stuff. So for me is the self-care, it is imperative. It is non-negotiable. So. I like that. Are you like, I guess you told me, but do you, a lot of people work great in the mornings, in terms of work, and then some people work great in the evenings, we call it early riser, burn them in that oil. What would you identify as? So I'm an extrovert by choice and during the day. So when it comes down to when it's six, five o'clock in the afternoon, I kind of like decompress, time to hang out with the family, just calm down. So I typically, I get up, I do really well in the mornings, I execute throughout the day, but then once starts getting into 6 p.m., I need to recharge. Right, right, right, right. Can you tell us a odd job that you've had before odd place you've worked at? Oh my gosh. My first job when I came to the U.S. was cleaning homes. Oh, okay. Yep. I agree. I was, I remember 15 and a half, I used to clean my neighbor's house. Wow. Okay, that's not bad. Yep, my first job also after that was Burger King. Okay, you work at Burger King? Yep. I work at Burger King. I had no desire to have Wauper with cheese. I'm like so old with that Wauper with cheese. How you say it? You don't look like you eat many Wauper's with cheese. Oh yeah, I love, I used to love, love, love, love Wauper with cheese. Yes. So you just had to work out how to... A whole different conversation. You know, my aunt, my aunt when the first answer that I had that I moved with in California, the perk and the recognition for helping her clean the house was Wauper with cheese. I was like, get a house clean because I'm going for the Wauper with cheese. I like that. I like that. If you weren't doing this, what do you think you'd be doing? Oh my gosh. This is such a hard question, Erin, because I couldn't imagine... Staying at that job. No, I couldn't imagine doing it because one of the things that I failed to tell you this really biggest motivation of her lives is that we adopted a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful little boy in 2010. And he's like it for us. He's like our lives, you know? And I couldn't imagine doing anything else and not being able to get up in the morning, get him ready, you know, take him to the bus stop, picking him up, going to his judo. I mean, I couldn't imagine anything else besides what I'm doing right now. So no, I think there's nothing else that I would be doing for this. Yeah, I saw that in the video that you made, the promo where it talked about adopting the boy and also providing a place for veterans to come to work. Yes, yes. Yeah, I saw that in that video. Yeah. I wasn't going to let you finish without telling us a story. I wasn't going to let you know. You know my weak spot, right? No, it's okay. It's not crying or something. But you know, on a funny note to tell you, English as a second language has been such a, just a fascinating experience for me because I have had to learn so much slang. And I always tell people that I am notorious for taking a beautiful word and turning it into a profanity because I just don't know. Or just like being very literal with people when they're explaining anything like rainy cats and dogs. I remember coming to the U.S. and people start talking rainy cats and dogs who left the gates open on 95 and I visualized everything. So if there's a funny aspect of Jean Payne, the CEO, this is a joke in my team. It's like they don't use slang, they don't use any of that stuff because I don't get it. And they visualized everything. So I would, I will stop them in the middle of the sentence and say, okay, I'm sorry, I don't get that. So what does that mean? So rainy cats and dogs, it's like really like rainy cats and dogs. Rainy cats and dogs. No, no, no, no. And so that's the funniest thing in our team is like people are just making fun of me because Jean doesn't get the slang. It says it's raining cats and dogs. Okay, wait. And you're right. You're right about that because I start learning Spanish as an adult and you do imagine, you're trying to picture the image in your mind of the word to make that connection. Yes, a very little connection. That connection. And I remember, I grew up in Miami, so we have a lot of Cubans and they say, me voy a ma patra. And I'm like, what? What are you talking about? Like the back, I'm like, when you call me from my back, I just didn't make any sense. I don't know what they were saying to you. And so I get that matter of a mix. What you're saying to me makes perfect sense. That makes total sense to me. That makes total sense. I like that. Do you do any type of like annual reflections on the business or retreat or anything that you go back and you look at how your year went, how your months went and go back? Do you do any of that, anything like that? Yes, yes. So we have a strategy. We have a plan that we followed throughout the year. And then as we conclude this year, we will do kind of like an analysis of, okay, how to wind up compared to what can we do better next year? What do we need to be more successful? So, yes. Okay, okay. All right. And because I'm respectfully in time, I want to give you a run. I'm sorry. Sorry. You know, kickboxing, hair, nails, running out the dogs. Body pump. Body, what's body pump? It's a weight training class. It's 55 minutes of nonstop weight training. It's phenomenal. I tell you, it will take out any frustration or any extra energy that you have. Any other tools that you use, like apps, software, things like that, that you've incorporated into your business now, that small businesses, maybe they could learn to use it early on. Do you use like Delltech or GovWin, any of that stuff? Yes. Okay. But you know what? There's so much information up there that is free. That doesn't cost anything, especially for small businesses. You know, there's a PDS, the Federal Procurement Database, that's a really big one to look at. And there's the other ones is, I tell people, go to the forecast for every agency has a forecast. Right. And identify what areas, who you want to do business with. And kind of basically, strategist said, okay, I want to do business with the Department of Energy. I want to do business with the Department of Defense and then start kind of looking through the forecast and making informed decisions of what do you want to focus on. Another thing that is really important to the many small business do not know is that if you're coming out of the corporate environment, that your individual professional experience actually does count, right? For the first two or three years of your business. So that is something that you can use to pass performance when you're submitting a proposal. And that's what I did when I was first starting. The company is I use my own personal experience as diversity inclusion as part of that past performance. Oh, I love it. I love it. All right. We're going to tell small businesses, leave with some parting words and close out for today. Oh, wow. I would say. I know you're going to slam dunk at this one. No pressure. No pressure. I would tell people, you are the only person who can hold yourself back. You're the person who can hold yourself back. Do what you're passionate about and you'll be successful. I did it. I have heard many people will have done it and you can do it too. I love it. And Eric, thank you so much for having me. This has been amazing. And it definitely, it makes me stop and recognize how great this journey has been for the past almost seven years. And sometimes I don't do that. So thank you. No, thank you for coming on. And thanks for sharing all those nuggets. And even before we even get started saying, hey, I want a platform to be able to share all this stuff with people. I hope that we're able to do that today to give you that opportunity to share those things. In fact, like I said, you, I've always had this impact on my mind, but hearing your story made me even more say, hey, I think that, because again, I have an audience, I have a platform. I hear from a lot of women business owners, a lot of women entrepreneurs getting started. I think that we need to give them a forum to where they could talk, engage and ask questions. So we definitely think we're gonna have you back if not in an actual conference, maybe on a call with, we can invite women entrepreneurs, this person's just to come on and hear from you and then ask questions. So I, that, you inspired me during that episode and I took a bunch of notes as I was writing as well. So. Oh, that's awesome. Good stuff. Good stuff. Thank you for what you're doing. I mean, you know, business do enjoy telling their story. And hopefully my story today has been an inspiration for others. And, you know, I'm hearing available if anybody needs anything. So. And we'll make sure to have all of your contact information or email everything on the website. If you have not already received an email from our staff, they will send you something to let you know where to sell your contact information. So we'll definitely have that available to everyone out there listening as well on our website govcon giants.com forward slash podcast.